Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| There we go. The live stream is going. Ah, I guess I shall start this thing. Here we go.
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Sam:
[0:38]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, May 9th, 2026. It is just seconds after 21 UTC as I am starting to record this. I am Sam Minter. Yvonne Boe is not here today. He had some stuff, I guess. Let's see, what did he say precisely? I'll look it up. I've been out all week and have to leave again. And I got to do some Mother's Day errands tomorrow, and I'm flying back late. Sorry for the late notice, but I didn't expect that I had to fly out again on Monday, so I have to punt. And that came in late enough that I sent out a note, you know, my usual note looking for co-hosts. But it was already Friday afternoon Pacific time and evening East Coast time. And so, of course, nobody took me up on it in time for me to be recording now. I had said I was going to record sometime Saturday between like 10 a.m. And 2 p.m. Pacific.
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Sam:
[1:44]
| It's at the very end of that window now. Because, of course, I said, you know, if anybody had responded to me by 9 a.m. Pacific, then we'd work out a specific time and go. So I had an alarm set for just after 9 a.m. Pacific to open up my email, check it. I saw that nobody had answered me. I went right back to sleep and slept a couple more hours. And then once I did get up, I played a video game with Alex and I had some food and...
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Sam:
[2:17]
| Then I slowly, slowly got myself ready to actually record. And honestly, I'm like, I could go right back to sleep. I could go back to sleep. I could go eat some more. I have a movie that I'm partway through with Alex that I could go finish. And I've got other things that I need to do. It just became my turn for a Robin Letter update on one of my Robins. I've got i'm i'm working a little bit on my bookshelf problem project which i haven't like touched in forever and yeah and i've got other stuff to do around the house and stuff but you know here i am here i am going to do the show as usual when i do a solo show i'm actually going to break it up and not do this whole show straight through without stops i'm going to do one segment and then stop and go do other stuff for a while and then come back and do another segment and then stop and do other stuff for a while. And then the same thing again. Probably only for, you know, three segments.
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Sam:
[3:25]
| Probably. That just, like, it spreads it out over more of the weekend. Of course, that also means it takes longer to get it done, and it occupies more of the weekend in the end. But, you know, whatever. It's more my speed when I'm doing it solo. This first segment, I'll do the movies that I previewed for the last two weeks and have not talked about yet. I owe them. I owe them this attention, because I owe you. These movies because I've been promising them. So I'll get to that. And then that'll be the first segment. After that, you know, who knows, more news may come, but I figure a big part of what I'll talk about is the gerrymandering stuff. We had the districts, I mentioned like last week, the VRA, Supreme Court ruling. But since then, several states have already jumped in to eliminate black districts in the South. And meanwhile, Virginia lost that court case. We'll talk about that stuff. And then the third segment, I don't know. Depends what happens. Depends how I feel. You know, stuff, stuff. Anyway, I'll probably jump straight into movies, unless any of you want to suggest anything. Oh, wait, I can't hear you. Sorry.
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Sam:
[4:52]
| There's, you know, one person watching live. That's Alex. I know he's watching live in the other room, so he could put stuff in the chat that he wants me to talk about, I guess.
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Sam:
[5:04]
| I may not. Anyway, the two movies that I'd mentioned a couple times here are Mr. Jones from 2019 and The Short History of the Long Road, also from 2019. So let's start with Mr. Jones. Okay. Oh, and Alex isn't watching anymore. Oh, well. Sucks to be him, I guess. Anyway, Mr. Jones, reading from Wikipedia as I often do, but I'll start with the, you.
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Sam:
[5:45]
| Mr. Jones, which was known in some countries as Citizen Jones in translation. Anyway, it's a 2019 biographical thriller film written and co-produced by Andrea Chalupa and directed by a name I can't pronounce, Holland. It is based on the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who uncovers the truth of the devastating famine, Holdomor, in which millions died in the Ukrainian SSR Soviet Union. So, jumping to the plot summary, like I often do, just the first two paragraphs won't spoil the rest. In 1933, Gareth Jones is an ambitious young journalist who has gained some renown for his interview with Adolf Hitler. The son of an English teacher in the Welsh colony of Hugyssovka in Soviet Ukraine, Jones is troubled by the question of how Stalin's Soviet Union can be having a spending spree as the numbers do not add up. Jones works as a political advisor to David Lloyd George, the former British Prime Minister, but with funding limited owing to the economic difficulties and after failing to make his case in a critical meeting, he is made redundant.
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Sam:
[7:07]
| Trading on his connections in Britain and in Russia, Jones manages to obtain a Russian visa with the intention of setting up an interview with Stalin. Upon arrival in Moscow, he meets Eugene Lyons, a Russian-American journalist who is with a party of British engineers from Metropolitan Vickers. They take him to a party at the home of Walter Durante and give him cryptic hints that the Soviets are not as enlightened as they make out and that Stalin's ability to pay for British engineers or new factories may not rest on the famed efficiency of the Ukrainian farms as they have claimed. He is also informed that journalists are forbidden to venture outside of Moscow. Through a chance meeting with fellow British journalist Ada Brooks, who is under close observation by the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, he learns that his contact in Moscow was murdered by the authorities while investigating the supposed Ukrainian agricultural revolution. Armed with this information, Joan alters his documents to make him appear to be still employed by Lloyd George and obtains an invitation to Ukraine by the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov. Dot, dot, dot. We continue on with the thing. It's a biopic. As with most biopics, it is fictionalized to some extent. You expect that.
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Sam:
[8:33]
| Andrea Chalupa and her sister have been in the news for various other things over the last few years related to Ukraine.
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Sam:
[8:42]
| But, you know, look, I enjoyed the movie. It was a good movie. It was very much in the biopic sense of that. Because it's a biopic, you don't have all of the, it's not like action scenes and car chases and all this kind of stuff. But it's an interesting slice of a period of history that I honestly have not spent a lot of time thinking about. And, you know, you've got the intrepid reporter going places he's not supposed to go, publishing things that people don't want to know, et cetera, et cetera. And And so, you know, and he exposes some atrocities by the Stalin regime. And it was well done. It was well done. And apparently, let's see, it won the Grand Prix Golden Lions Award at the 44th Polish Film Festival in 2019. There you go.
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Sam:
[10:06]
| So it did win one minor award. Reception, it's got an 86% at Rotten Tomatoes. Critical consensus reads, Flawed yet fundamentally worthy, Mr. Jones peers into the past to tell a fact-based story that remains troublingly relevant today. Okay. Preeta Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it 4 out of 5, bold and heartfelt movie with a real lenient sweep. Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph gave it 3 out of 5, praising Sarsgaard, one of the actor's first performance, and for raising the sadly untapped potential of the film. Robey criticized the script and concluded, there's enough in Mr. Jones to make you want a good deal more, so those are some, eh, you know, okay but could be better type reviews. Anyway, I don't have a lot more to say about it. I think it's, I am giving it a thumbs up. It is worth watching, I think, but it is worth watching mainly for the let's look at the history of what's going on. What's going on. It gives you some background into Ukrainian history, basically.
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Sam:
[11:22]
| And it's a good picture of that. But it's less about it being like as a film. And it's not quite a documentary, of course. It is a fictionalized biopic. But I still enjoyed it. I still enjoyed it. I had fun. And there you go. Okay, before I move on to the next movie, Alex got back in the thing and has been texting Dungeons and Robins Gawoo Abolfnaf, a language character of some sort, then Abolfnaf, Abolfnaf, Abolfnaf, Gowoo. Gowoo is what he texts when he wants attention. So maybe I'll mention some of those things in the third segment. We'll see. Okay, next movie. The Short History of the Long Road from 2019.
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Sam:
[12:21]
| Starting with Wikipedia as usual. A 2019 American drama film Written, directed by Ani Simon-Kennedy. It stars Sabrina Carpenter, Stephen Og, Danny Trejo, Maggie Siff, and Rusty Schwimmer. It had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was released by FilmRise. The plot, they have only even got one paragraph of plot summary here. Come on, so this movie deserves some more attention. Somebody get it on the Wikipedia page. It's not going to be me. Anyway, a teenage Nola, Carpenter, has spent much of her life on the open road with her self-reliant father, played by Aug. The pair crisscrosses the United States in a refurbished RV, making ends meet by doing odd jobs. A shocking rupture, though, casts Nola out on her own. She makes her way to Albuquerque, New Mexico in search of her mother, who she never knew. When her motorhome unexpectedly breaks down, Nola forges a bond with an auto body shop owner, Trejo. She then finds more about her mother, and while getting to know her, she learns more about Clint and why he chose this lifestyle for them. Okay.
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Sam:
[13:36]
| Here's the thing. When I brought this up, I had no idea anything at all about this movie. I didn't even know Sabrina Carpenter was in it until I opened it up. Now, I knew Sabrina Carpenter from singing, from being the, you know, she's a pop star now. And I actually had no idea. That she also acted. You know, at some point along the lines, probably around the same time I saw this movie, which was like almost a year ago at this point.
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Sam:
[14:10]
| I started seeing clips of her in Boy Meets, not Boy Meets, Girl Meets World, which was the sequel series to Boy Meets World, which I guess was, what, Disney? Nickelodeon? What was it? Boy Meets World. It was on it was on abc actually neither one uh it was it was from walt disney studios though okay well no it was done on walt disney studios stage and for some of the seasons is anyway it was on abc it was an abc show anyway she was on that apparently too a show i've never seen. I've seen clips of it, but I had no idea that she was in this thing. And the main thing as I watched it was actually like, oh, wait, this girl can act. I mean, she's a pop star, but she could act too.
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Sam:
[15:15]
| I enjoyed this movie. I like this movie. There were a variety of characters in it, but it was basically a showcase for Sabrina Carpenter. She was the main character. She was in essentially the whole thing follows her travels and who she meets and who she interacts with. So she's, she's practically the entire movie and other people just sort of revolve around her. And I'll admit to being surprised because I only knew her as like, you know, pop star, young, up and coming, like singer type. And, but she did a good job. Like I watched this movie. I, she was convincing. The situations were convincing. I, you know, this, this is a movie that does all the tug on your heartstrings things that I tend to like in movies because, you know, as it said, you know, she, she was traveling with her father. She lost her father, then she, like, goes on the search for her mom, and then, like, well, what does she find out about her history, and what does that mean for her life, and what she's making of herself as she, you know, is now on her own.
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Sam:
[16:39]
| I really enjoyed this movie I'm giving it a thumbs up it says it received generally positive reviews 89% at Rotten Tomatoes, Critical consensus a potential breakout vehicle for its writer director as well as its star the short history of the long road finds fresh byways along its well-traveled path, there you go Variety praised her performance stating that she permeated the screen with an astutely soulful quality that's tough to turn away from.
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Sam:
[17:14]
| Yeah, I liked it. Made me, like, think maybe when she gets bored with this pop star stuff, she should go back to acting because she was good. And I mean, I've seen like the little clips from Girl Meets World or whatever, and it's sort of typical like sitcom stuff. There's nothing like outstanding about it. I mean, it's perfectly acceptable, but it's like not something where you're like, oh, my God, the acting's incredible. No, it's like a sitcom aimed at kids or very young teens. It's aimed at tweens, I guess. And so it's the acting that's sort of typical of that kind of thing. But this was like, oh, okay, she's good. So I hope she does some more acting as her career continues, as well as the singing. She's got some good songs, too. Thank you.
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Sam:
[18:17]
| You know, she's doing well. Like, not that, you know, she needs any advice from me. I mean, she's like incredibly successful at this point and seems to be having fun. Last I saw, and you haven't heard any stories yet about her, like doing the like phase where all of these sort of people who get famous when they're really young, go crazy and nuts. And, like, are getting into all kinds of trouble. Haven't heard that about her yet.
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Sam:
[18:53]
| Don't know if she'll avoid it completely. It seems it's one of those things where kids, you know, people who become famous when they are kids, and apparently, like, she's been in one thing or another since she was, like, 10 years old, 8 years old, something I saw. So she's been around a while. I guess she's in her, how old is she now? 20-something? 20-something? She's 26 now. So she's not like a child anymore, but she's still young. I saw a clip on TikTok from Taylor Swift, apparently during Taylor Swift's big concert series, when it was, last year, the year before? I don't even know. Whenever it was, sort of towards the end of that, Sabrina Carpenter was also blowing up and also having her own tour. And Taylor Swift invited Sabrina Carpenter to join her on stage at one of her own concerts that was apparently sandwiched right between two of Sabrina's concerts. And the Taylor Swift quote would be, like, that's so much, like, she's got a concert the day before, a concert after, would it be child abuse to ask her to come? And I just thought that was funny because, like.
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Sam:
[20:18]
| She's still young. I mean, it's not that young, but young enough. Certainly compared to, like, me.
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Sam:
[20:29]
| Man. Anyway, she can apparently act as well. And let's see. What was her? When did she start? I said maybe eight or something. Okay.
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Sam:
[20:44]
| 2011. 2011 looks like her first stuff. And she was born in 99, so that's like 12. Okay, she was like 12 when she started. And by the way, it looks like her very first television role was on Law & Order Special Victims Unit. There you go. Okay, that's the movies for now. Next on the list, let's see, what's next? Oh, a true classic for next time around. Or maybe I should do more this time. I don't know. Like, I didn't know Yvonne. I could do more now. No, I'll save it for the moment. Anyway, next up, The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland from 1999. Absolute classic. And then a TV series I finished.
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Sam:
[21:42]
| Cosmos. Now, you all may, of course, immediately come to the Carl Sagan from the 1980s, but there were actually three versions of this. We watched all three. We treated them as seasons of a show because Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a couple more series of it that were brought back by Seth MacFarlane, who did Family Guy and The Orville and a variety of other things. Anyway, there was a season in 1980, a season in 2014, and a season in 2020. It's almost weird calling them seasons when they're separated by, like, that long. But yeah, no, we watched all three.
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Sam:
[22:23]
| And we'll talk more about that. Like, the last of the three was hard to find, if I remember right. Anyway, enough for now. We'll take a break. When we come back, unless there are massive breaking news events in the meantime, my intention is the next segment will be about all the gerrymandering and redistricting and VRA and all of this kind of stuff and the overall implications of all of this because it potentially takes us to a bad spot. And we're already in a bad spot. Takes us to a worse spot. Okay, time for that break. This break, this time. And, yeah, who knows how many hours it'll be for me before I come back. But for you, won't be long at all. Won't be long at all.
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Break:
[23:20]
| You're supposed to say do, do, do. Do, do, do. Alex Amzala! Alex Amzala is awesome. its videos are fun and today once again we have one of our most loyal subscribers here to tell you how awesome Alex Emsola is. I'd say on a rate from 1 to 10 Alex Emsola is awesome at I don't know 37 82 he's pretty radical his videos are phenomenal they're full of creativity And they're so funny and exciting to watch. Wow, what happened to your voice then, Amy? Was that Dad pretending to be you because the audio was distorted when it really wasn't because I told him to? Yes! Good job on remembering, Dad. Do, do, do!
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Sam:
[24:20]
| Yeah. So here I am back. As I said, it would be a while. And in fact, it has been like well over 24 hours. You know, I like skipped an entire day. I did other stuff. We like did like a Mother's Day dinner with my wife and my mother. You know, I don't know. And, you know, I slept an entire 11 plus hours. Well, I guess just an 11 minus hours. It was like 10 hours and 50 minutes or something. I don't know, according to the sleep tracker thingies that I got. And, you know, I guess I was tired. I dragged all day Saturday. Then, like, I slept the 11 hours. Then I dragged most of Sunday.
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Sam:
[25:10]
| I don't know. anyway given that it is now Monday May 11th just before 4 UTC as I'm recording this segment and I'm going to let you know right now this will be the last segment I'm not going to do three segments first of all, It's late. I have to get this done and out and whatever, so I can move on to other things. But also, I don't find a really compelling additional topic. I mentioned I'm going to talk about the gerrymandering wars, and I will do that. But like, you know, I've got Ivan added to the list, you know, Ted Turner died. I'll let him talk about that. He added it to the list. He can talk about that some, his influence, whatever. We've, of course, got Iran and Middle East stuff going on. It seems like we're sort of in the same limbo we've been in for a while now, where periodically Donald Trump says, we're on the verge of a peace deal. And then Iran's like, no. And then we continue. You know, we had an election in the UK, local elections all over the place, and reform made big gains. And both labor and the conservatives lost a bunch. Green made some gains to the Green Party, but the big story was reform gaining ground.
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Sam:
[26:32]
| Yeah, whatever. So things are happening. Things are going on. Things are always going on. It's okay. But.
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Sam:
[26:42]
| Redistricting wars and everything associated with it. Look, we have this round of things. And, you know, gerrymandering has a long, noble history. It's probably not the right word for it. I mean, going back to Eldridge Gary, and it was pronounced Gary, not Jerry, who first, yeah, there was a district and there was an editorial cartoon and it looked a little bit like a salamander. And we're talking about, you know, the very first years of the United States under the current Constitution. You know, this is not a new thing by any means. And both current parties and the previous parties, like the Whigs and stuff, did this crap too, I'm sure. But the Democrats and Republicans have both done this at various points in time. More recently, in the last couple of decades, the Democrats have been more on a push for, hey, let's have nonpartisan redistricting, blah, blah, blah. And they did that in a whole bunch of states. Meanwhile, the Republicans were continuing to do what, you know.
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Sam:
[27:57]
| The redistricting that was always normal before that. And Democrats certainly did that in a few states as well, even relatively recently. But this latest round was kicked off by Donald Trump asking Texas to go get him some additional seats in Texas. And Texas did.
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Sam:
[28:18]
| And Donald Trump was asking some other states. He wanted Indiana to do it and a whole bunch of others and blah, blah, blah. I remember Indiana because Indiana said no. And did not redistrict as per Donald Trump's request, which interesting, by the way, there were like eight state legislature, eight state legislators that were responsible for the redistricting effort going down in flames in Indiana. Donald Trump put in and his supporters put in lots of money to primary those eight. And seven of those eight Republicans lost in primaries this last week as well. So showing that Donald Trump still has some power, a decent amount of power to, you know, push against people in his own party and sort of, you know, punish people who go against him. But anyway, obviously, you know, California reacted to Texas, did their own heavily partisan gerrymander that basically undid what was done in Texas in terms of the net effect on the country. And then getting up to the more recent events.
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Sam:
[29:35]
| Virginia had a referendum to redistrict as further part of this tit for tat. Let's do maximum partisan gerrymandering on both sides. And they did a redistricting that would have gone to, I believe, it was 10 to 1 Democratic favor, whereas right now it's like 6 to 5 or something like that.
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Sam:
[29:58]
| And that would have actually put the Democrats slightly ahead in this redistricting battle with all the states that had done it so far. It was pretty close to even, but it would have put the Democrats slightly ahead. The Virginia Supreme Court said that the Democrats did not do this correctly.
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Sam:
[30:20]
| Now, specifically, they said that, hey, any referendum, it was all about the timing, any referendum doing this kind of thing had to be done a certain amount of time before the election, and they said this had not been. Now, apparently, from what I've read, this relies on them counting the amount of time before the election as the amount of time before early voting starts, which seems like a reasonable position, honestly. However, apparently the precedent had been that whenever deadlines like that were given a certain amount of time before the election, it was always measured as before the actual election day. And this is the first time a court in Virginia, or I think potentially anywhere, had interpreted this as the amount of time before the beginning of early voting instead. And so they tossed it out on those grounds. Now, for Virginia, and then we'll talk about the VRA stuff in a second, don't worry, I won't forget. But in the case of Virginia, I've heard a number of people say, like, okay.
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Sam:
[31:33]
| But we probably didn't need to expend this political capital anyway, because given what the polls are looking like, yes, Virginia, you know, this would have gained five additional seats for the Democrats or four, four or five, whatever it was near there. But given how current polling is looking, the Democrats potentially would have gained almost that amount, if not that amount anyway, with the old districts that they are back to right now, simply because, yes, those were Republican seats, but they were Republican seats that were narrowly Republican. And if we do have a year where the Democrats do exceedingly well, which, frankly, is the norm even in regular midterms. The president's party tends to always lose seats in midterms. But it's looking like we may be beyond that into a wave year this time. And look, we still got time before the election. Things could still change. But, you know, things are not looking great for Republicans right now.
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Sam:
[32:52]
| And so we might have gotten almost all those seats anyway, even without this redistricting, so why spend the political capital on it? And people are bringing that up again because people are saying, well, this court ruling is illegitimate and blah, blah, blah, and we have to fight back against it.
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Sam:
[33:10]
| There are some appeals going on, but now, you know, this was the state Supreme Court. So if you're going to appeal it again, it has to go up on the federal side, go to the Supreme Court eventually of the U.S.
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Sam:
[33:22]
| And this is the current 6-3 SCOTUS. Do you really expect that they're going to be like, oh, yeah, the Democrats changing this to a 10-1, you know, thing in favor of the Democrats? Ah, that's absolutely fine. And of course, I say the Democrats. It was a referendum. It was passed by the people of Virginia. But yeah, no. So that's probably dead as is. Now, people are coming up with potentially really aggressive ways the Democrats could fight back dirty. Because, for instance, this is the one that's been talked about most recently, the Virginia Constitution allows the state legislature to set a retirement age for judges on the Supreme Court. That retirement age is currently set at age 70. It's a mandatory retirement age. When a judge gets to be that age, they're out. They have to be replaced. Well, the proposal is set the mandatory retirement age to one year younger than the youngest justice on the Supreme Court of Virginia at the moment, which would be 54. All of them have to retire.
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Sam:
[34:50]
| Governor gets to replace the entire court in one sweep, and then presumably you reappeal this and have them go the other way.
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Sam:
[35:02]
| Now, in order to even do that and have time to do anything, they'd have to do it very quickly. It's unclear whether they have the support to actually do that. But it would be, you know, Yvonne and I on this show have said for a while now, it's time for the Democrats to use whatever levers of power they have and fight, fight, fight. And don't worry about norms. Don't worry about, you know, the longer-term implications of this, because right now you got something short-term you got to deal with. And so they could do this. Again, I think an important part of this calculation, though, does have to be, like, if you're going to get most of these seats anyway, just from having a good year, is it worth sort of burning things down in this way for this particular thing?
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Sam:
[36:08]
| And I guess before I talk more about burning things down, let's talk about the VRA side of things. Because this is the kind of thing that's happening there, too. So, last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ripped up essentially what was left of the Voter Rights Act from, you know, 64, 65, whenever it was. And basically, this last little bit was that you could appeal districts based on, you know, were they constructed in a way that had a negative racial impact? Importantly it didn't care about motive didn't care like were you doing this because you're racist the question was did it have a disproportionate impact on certain minorities and this has been used to make sure you have districts that were representing black populations in the South, Hispanic populations in the Southwest, and even other minorities in other areas.
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Sam:
[37:30]
| The ruling here basically said, theoretically, there is still a VRA process in place, but they've made it so you essentially have to prove the racial motivations.
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Sam:
[37:47]
| And a previous Supreme Court ruling years back now said that gerrymandering for partisan purposes was absolutely fine. No reason not to do that. They could do that as much as they wanted. And it was only the racial reasoning that was problematic still. So at this point, you could theoretically still do a VRA appeal, but basically it's been reduced to you would have to have the people drawing the new districts explicitly say out loud with cameras running, yes, we are drawing these districts to make sure we don't get any black representatives. They would have to be absolutely explicit in their racist goals for here. And if they could even slightly plausibly say, no, we're doing this because we want Republicans to win and not Democrats. We're doing this to screw the Democrats. We're not doing this to screw the Blacks. We're doing this to screw the Democrats. If they can even plausibly say that, then everything's fine. Go for it. Now, the result of this.
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Sam:
[39:09]
| Is that already several states have either already finished or at least have started the process of redrawing their districts for 2026, even when they had to, like, in some cases, delay primary elections in order to make this happen, in order to do what they call cracking existing black districts and taking cities that have a high minority population and split them up with white areas, rural and suburban areas, in order to make it so you don't have any majority minority districts anymore. And several southern states have, like I said, I think Tennessee is already finished. The governor's already signed it. several other states, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, have this in process and are likely to finish soon. Now, all of these will, of course, go to court, but in the end, with the current environment, they're likely to be upheld. After all, they're just doing what Supreme Court just told them they're allowed to do. And the likely result is a lot fewer minority representatives in Congress.
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Sam:
[40:33]
| And I think one of the things I've started to see, though, which is almost...
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Sam:
[40:42]
| Just like we were talking about with the Democrats in Virginia. Like, they might have gotten those gains anyway. For the Republicans that are doing this redistricting to remove black districts.
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Sam:
[41:00]
| If you do the math, you essentially, by pulling in some of these more black and, yes, more Democratic cities into these districts that previously were all rural, and you're rejiggering this way, you are making those new districts less red than they were before. So you may, may, again, this is all, like, not all of these districts are even settled yet, and we've got a long way to go, and even if a deep red district becomes pink, That doesn't mean it's blue, but it does mean that if there is a wave election, you might actually not end up with the desired result of making these states, you know, 100% Republican. You may not actually end up eliminating the Democratic seat. Hell, you may get Democratic gains in some of these.
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Sam:
[42:08]
| But you might succeed in eliminating the black members of Congress and replacing them with some like white Democrats who can better appeal to that larger district. Maybe. Who knows? But if that happens, if after this massive redistricting that supposedly is to just lock in Republicans, they actually don't get the Republican lock in and still have Democrats, they're just not necessarily correct. The black Democrats, then it almost leads you directly to, oh, well, then, yeah, this was racist as opposed to partisan.
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Sam:
[42:56]
| It'll be interesting to see what happens there. And it does depend on do the Democrats have as good a year as people are currently expecting? Now, there are lots of ways that could go wrong for the Democrats. We've seen the Democrats many times before snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, as they say, where they've sort of gotten too confident that, oh, yeah, we're going to win. It's okay. We don't have to show up. We're going to win anyway. Hey, I'm looking at you, 2016, and then you don't get that result. But in the meantime, Democrats are 100% assuming. And before I get to the pure Democrat-Republican part of this thing, I do want to step back and say, even if you get Republicans overreaching and not getting the number of Republican seats that they hope for out of these things, if they succeed in eliminating minority members of Congress, this is still a bad thing. And even if some of those minority members of Congress somehow hang on in their newly restructured districts.
|
Sam:
[44:25]
| By districting in such a way that you're sort of intentionally breaking up these communities of interest is in and of itself problematic anyway. And, you know, look, part of this is simply, you know, first-past-the-post single-member districts that are drawn on geographic lines, you're always going to have these kinds of problems. Other countries solve this with proportional representation and party lists and all kinds of other mechanisms that let you, you know, if your overall population, you know, is split 60-40, you end up with 60-40 representation. And that, those kinds of methods also let third parties live in a way that they can't in our system so that you could get like, you know, 40% for one, 30% for another, you know, 20%? Am I at it? Is it 40, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90? Yeah. There you go. 20. And, and, and, and, and. Miscellaneous smaller parties. I'm not going to name any more numbers, so I don't have to do math.
|
Sam:
[45:44]
| But, you know, it allows those kinds of things to happen and coalitions to be formed and all this kind of stuff that ours really doesn't. Because remember, let's say you had a completely, uniformly distributed population in terms of political views, in terms of race, in terms of gender, in terms of everything, and then you evenly divided those into districts. Well, whoever was the largest group just wins 100% because they would be the majority in every district. Our whole system relies on the notion that political preferences vary geographically. And then the question is making districts that reflect that variation in a fair way. But fundamentally, what does fair mean? How do you define it? How do you structure that? And who does it advantage? There's no way to do this that theoretically could make everybody happy all the time. The closest we have are these sort of nonpartisan redistricting commissions. But, anyway.
|
Sam:
[46:58]
| To the straight politics. Now, with the Republicans doing this in a number of states and assuming that it will lock in Republican seats all over the place, the Democrats are saying, well, oh crap, we have to do the same thing too. And if we can do it in time for 2026, great. But I mean, it's May. Primaries are happening all over the country already. And we're running out of time for that. But anything that can't be done in 2026, there'll be plenty of time to do it for 2028. I mean, this Virginia thing was thrown out because theoretically it was done a few weeks too late.
|
Sam:
[47:44]
| Well, you got tons of time for 2028 to get that done for 2028. The same thing is true of many other states where you could conceivably, and I've seen people online generate these maps, if you went absolutely maximalist and every state that had a Democratic trifecta did maximal redistricting towards the Democrats and every state with a Republican trifecta did the same towards the Republicans, You would end up with a map where almost every state was essentially sending either 100% Democrats or 100% Republicans to the Congress and making it into a situation where... You just have, you take the polarization we have right now, and it's like amping it up to maximum levels. Because now, you know, if you are a Democrat in a red state or a Republican in a blue state, you have no way to feel represented. And that's our, you know, to a large degree, that's already true in lots of states. but this would sort of make that true almost everywhere.
|
Sam:
[49:11]
| And look, we're in a situation where if one side's doing it, it would be crazy for the other side not to respond the same way, because you're just letting yourself get kicked if you don't. But at the same time, I fully acknowledge this, people have called it a race to the bottom, and it is, because the place you get to at the end of that is not healthy for anybody. But once you're in that downward spiral, neither side can stop without just losing, you know, the only way out of a spiral like that.
|
Sam:
[50:08]
| Is at some point for both sides essentially to agree simultaneously to, okay, we're just going to use nonpartisan redistricting everywhere. Or similar. Or frankly, depending on how much damage is done on the spiral downward. It's like, do we, we're at the point where, you know, do we, do we have to start readdressing everything? like the Senate. The very way the Senate exists right now is fundamentally problematic and will become more so in the future with current population trends. The low population states, for the most part, are declining even further in population, while the high population states are gaining even more. What this means is the already disproportionate influence of the low-population states in the U.S. Senate is going to grow more and more and more over the coming decades. So what do you do about that? I've joked before on Archimedians Corner Slack that at some point you need to redistrict the states. Like, every 10 years, change the state boundaries, too, to make sure that our 50 states have approximately the same population.
|
Sam:
[51:30]
| Of course, that potentially makes this problem even worse. Or get rid of the Senate entirely. In the House, you can make redistricting matter a lot less by having a lot more representatives. We froze the size of the House of Representatives in the early 20th century. Instead of keeping, you know, for the early years there had been a ratio, it was sort of like one representative for every 100,000 people something like that, I forget the exact ratio but if we went back to that we would like.
|
Sam:
[52:04]
| Again, I forget the right numbers, but something like doubling the number of people in the House right now, maybe even more. But the smaller the districts are, the less badness can be done by redistricting. Or you go to multi-member districts and something proportional or rank choice voting everywhere combined with proportional. There are all kinds of potential ways that you could solve these. Oh, and by the way, while you're at it, get rid of the Electoral College. You know, that's another big distortion. You know, there's a question of how big do you get these? And part of that, of course, is what's the lift to do it? You know, as I mentioned on the show with Yvonne a couple weeks ago, you know, the House had already passed their big voter bill during the Biden administration that died in the Senate. It could potentially have solved the redistricting issue by saying, you know what?
|
Sam:
[53:11]
| Partisan redistricting is illegal. We're not going to do it anymore. End of story. Now, who knows, that might not survive the current SCOTUS either, and you might have to do Supreme Court reform at the same time to do that, but that could be done potentially just by legislation. Most of the other things I mentioned would require a constitutional amendment, which is a much heavier lift.
|
Sam:
[53:40]
| But if we do this race to the bottom, we're going to be in such a messy situation. Like, you know, people talk about, like, You know, are we going to have a Civil War II or whatever? And generally speaking, so far, the answer has been like, you know, there's a lot that could happen, but we're probably not actually going there. And one of the reasons is that, you know, even the reddest states actually have a significant number of blue folks in them. You know, like, I haven't looked it up lately, but like even Wyoming is not an 80-20 state. You know, we're talking more like 60-40, maybe a little bit more than 60-40 in the most extreme states. But most states really are more like, you know, are more purple than that. Even the quote-unquote blue states, the very blue and very red states, are still not that far. Of course, now I have to actually look it up to give you some real numbers. I'm going to look up election 2024.
|
Sam:
[55:06]
| Okay, here we go. I have it in front of me. Okay, the worst state, well, worst, and I'm not counting, like, okay, worst, worst, worst, Nebraska's third district, okay? That was 76% Trump Vance, 22% Harris Waltz. hair swells. And that's, you know, okay, 75%. But that's a small dish. Wyoming, 71-26.
|
Sam:
[55:44]
| West Virginia, 70-30. And then they're all closer, you know, after these, you know? A state that you think of as solidly red, like Texas, was 56-42. Now, Texas, as we've discussed, And if you remember election graphs, actually like always on the verge of going purple. So it's red, but not as red as people think it is. But really, like, I mean, you know, Louisiana is a 60-40, you know? And going in the other direction, Vermont is 60, was 64, Harris, 32, Trump. The point is that, okay, fine, fine. I'll give you D.C., 90% Democratic, 7% Trump, and then others, okay? I'll give you D.C. or 6.47% Trump. I'll give you D.C. Okay, D.C. is, you know, very, very blue. But most places are really somewhat purple. But what happens if you take all of these states that are really somewhat purple and completely.
|
Sam:
[57:02]
| Disenfranchise the minority to make it so they have no influence whatsoever. They are not sending any people to Congress. Most of these redistricting schemes also target state legislators, state legislators. I keep messing that up. That's a theme this episode. And so if you eliminate people's ability to even have the loyal minority and have their representatives in place that they can see trying stuff, doing something, then you make those people feel increasingly isolated. It, increasingly like there's no way the system can ever help them and make them more prone to violence. And frankly, we've been seeing some of that nationwide anyway, in terms of the log jam in nationwide politics is frankly a big part of what got Trump elected both times. It's why we swing back and forth because everybody's always throw the bums out because they're never getting the results they hope for. And so when people don't feel the political system can get them the results they want, they start looking for alternatives.
|
Sam:
[58:26]
| And that's when things can get violent. And if you further polarize things, and so you really are sort of geographically separating things, and you have your red states and you have your blue states, and if you're in a state you don't like, you better ass move now, then those things get even more isolated. And once you have the political divisions mirrored by geographic divisions, the notion of, well, fuck, let's just go ahead and have that national divorce.
|
Sam:
[59:06]
| Let's, you know, the only reason we had civil war over the civil war was because the North didn't want to let the South go. If both sides just said, fuck it, let's just separate. Then that maybe you have something, but chances are no, because you've got all these minorities in, in both States. And by this, I'm meaning political minorities, which often coincide with racial minorities, then you're going to have a freaking mess. And I'm not predicting that I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying that the further you go into this race to the bottom, the further you go in terms of disenfranchising people and making them feel like they have no other way to have a voice, the greater the chances of such things. And it can get very messy, very fast. And so, you know, it's one of those things where, yes, the clear right answer is to not have gerrymandering it all.
|
Sam:
[1:00:15]
| Let's have the nonpartisan redistricting or one of the other more radical solutions I mentioned earlier and eliminate this particular problem. You'll still have other problems. Let's not pretend, but eliminate this particular problem. But that's not the world we're in right now. The world we're in right now is where you're in a tit-for-tat. If one side does it, the other side has to do it back. And if the other side does it back more aggressively, then the first side has to be more aggressive too. And you're in that downward spiral. And if you start having to do more aggressive things in order to do it, like, oh, the courts did something we didn't like. So let's force all the judges out and appoint brand new ones we like that will give us the answer that we want. Okay. Well, that's just raised the bar further. You do that in Virginia. Right now, the Montana Supreme Court, by some crazy fluke of history, is, you know, dominated by folks that were originally nominated by Democrats. It's a more liberal Supreme Court in a red state. They're going to do the same thing, right? In the opposite direction. Perhaps on other issues. Perhaps, you know, whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:01:41]
| It's a downward spiral, and it ends in a very, very unhealthy place. But you can't get out of spirals like this without either yeah look the main way out of it is when both sides come to their senses and agree on a truce and say this isn't helping either of us let's do something that will actually be fair to both of us going forward for decades as opposed to something that helps us in a very short-term tactical right-now scenario. But you need both sides to be there. And we are certainly not there. I was going to mention the other way you get out of these downward spirals is for one side to win so decisively that the other side is essentially utterly crushed for a generation. You know? And then...
|
Sam:
[1:02:45]
| You have the other side eventually start to figure out new things that aren't necessarily for competing with that old side that was crushed, but instead for the new divisions that come up within the side that won. You know, I had joked years ago, and we're obviously not in that timeline, that I looked forward to the day when the Republicans were essentially spent as a political force and the only fights that mattered were essentially, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:03:23]
| The Bernie wing of the Democratic Party versus the Clinton and Obama wing of the Democratic Party. You know, progressives versus more centrist Democrats. And that becomes the new two sides of the American political spectrum as the conservative side dies out. Well, that's not happening, but at least not in the short term. But, you know, that's the other way that you can get out of these downward spirals, is essentially the original battle that caused the downward spiral. One side wins, the other side loses, and then you set up a new conflict between factions within the winning side. And then at the early stages of that, they feel confident enough about their power that they set up a system that's more fair.
|
Sam:
[1:04:19]
| That's assuming, of course, you still have folks that just believe in the general concept of democracy in general. General, general, general. I keep saying that word.
|
Sam:
[1:04:30]
| If the side that wins is one that basically believes in autocracy, then you have an entirely different set of paths that eventually lead you out of autocracy, but it can take a while.
|
Sam:
[1:04:46]
| Anyway, and then again, just to close on one final note, all of this redistricting madness that we've been doing so far may end up only making a net change of a handful of seats one way or the other. And if we have, like, I saw some estimates early on, so that they're, you know, somewhat outdated for some of the recent events in the last few weeks. But some of the estimates early on said that in terms of an absolute number of seats, Democrat versus Republican, if you let all of this redistricting play out to the maximal effect on both sides, you end up with one side or the other maybe gaining five seats out of the whole damn exercise. Like, obviously, if one side did it and the other side didn't, it could be more than that. But the idea is if both sides did it maximally, they mostly cancel themselves out and you end up with maybe a five-point difference. Maybe with some of this new VRA districts, you get a few more out of that. Call it 10.
|
Sam:
[1:05:59]
| On average, the president's party loses like 20 seats in midterms. And in wave elections, it can be 40 or 50 seats. And so that five-seat advantage gained by all of this redistricting warfare may end up just not mattering all that much in the end on the pure partisan basis. Like I said, it may have other effects in terms of, you know, certain populations not getting proper representation, but in terms of the pure partisan nature of things. Maybe, okay, it makes it harder. Like if the Republicans do get a gain of 5 to 10 seats out of the redistricting nonsense, this makes it harder for the Democrats, no question whatsoever. But if the Democrats are gaining like 20, 30, 40 seats anyway, then this makes it, okay, instead of 20 to 40, it's 10 to 30 seats they gain. Given how close things are right now, that's still enough to flip the chamber. We'll see. Now, if it ends up a hell of a lot closer than that, maybe those 5 to 10 seats end up being the balance of power.
|
Sam:
[1:07:18]
| But right now, it's not looking like that. And of course, the Senate's a whole other question. Senate is not affected by redistricting because we currently do not redistrict the states to make sure that we have 50 equal population states. It would be a fun thing to try. But no, we don't do that right now. And so we can analyze the Senate another time. Bottom line on it is it had looked like the Republicans were shoo-in to keep the Senate, given how their position has deteriorated over the last few months. And now it looks like the Senate is, the Republicans are probably still slightly favored, but it's competitive. It's within the realm of, yeah, the Democrats could definitely do this. If they have a really good night, if they don't have a good night, Publicans still keep it. Anyway, that's it. I have nothing else to say. I'm going to wrap this sucker up.
|
Sam:
[1:08:21]
| Then I'll get this out in a few hours. I don't know. It's already, what, 9.40 p.m. here Pacific time? I don't know. I want to do some other things besides put the show together. But I want to get it out, too. So we'll see. I'll get it out sometime. Yeah, maybe it'll be more like Monday morning for you East Coasters. I don't know. We'll see. I'll get it out. I'll get it out whenever. You know, sometimes I haven't put this show out till Tuesday. Maybe I'll do one of those. Eh, I don't know. Probably not. But whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:08:56]
| Curmudgeons-corner.com Go to our website. Look at our transcripts. Listen to our old shows. See all the ways to contact us. Go to Patreon and give us money. We would like a lot more money. I would like a lot more money. Forget about Yvonne. He's still employed. I'm unemployed. Give me some money. Give me just tons of money so that I don't have to do this looking for a job bullshit that I don't really want to do. You know, so just... I know some of you out there must be, you know, in the billionaire class, just throw me a bone here, you know? I'll do more shows. Do you want more shows? I'll do less shows. I'll do whatever you want. Anyway, that's it. And at our Patreon, of course, at various levels, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We'll send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug. Or at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us. We will invite you to our Commudgeons Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and a variety of listeners have been, and I was going to say, and always will be. That's probably not true. That's probably a little bit ambitious. Always is a little bit whatever. Anyway, we are chatting about the news, sharing links, all that kind of stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:10:20]
| Yvonne's not here, but I will still give a highlight from the recent curmudgeons corner slack that is worth mentioning? Let's do this one. We'd mentioned before, and the airport closest to Yvonne, the commercial airport closest to Yvonne, the Palm Beach Airport, has now officially changed its name to the President Donald J. Trump International Airport. I think Yvonne usually goes to Miami anyway, and not Palm Beach. But he has sworn to never fly that airport again. I presume so long as it has that name. He says he hasn't flown it in a few years, and this isn't helping. Yeah. And of course, it's structured as a deal where they pay licensing to, you know, Trump's companies.
|
Sam:
[1:11:21]
| So it's yet another way to, you know, for Trump and his family to, To play the grifting game. Fun. Okay, with that, I'm going to close this sucker up. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. I know the solo shows are a little bit different. Not quite what you're expecting when you hear Yvonne and I bantering. You don't get quite the same comedic effect. You don't get to hear Yvonne yell and scream and lose his temper.
|
Sam:
[1:11:54]
| But thank you for tuning in anyway. And hopefully he'll be back next week. As I understand it, he's been having a series of pretty stressful weeks. So, but hopefully he'll be back next time. And with that, I am out of here. Goodbye! Bye. Thank you. Do you have something to add, Alex?
|
Alex:
[1:12:45]
| Ah! Ah!
|
Sam:
[1:12:49]
| Okay. With that, I'm hitting stop. Bye, all!
| |
|
